PEACE IS ELUSIVE IN CROWN HEIGHTS

Police try more involvement; neighbors say city’s help needed

Oceanside city officials, police and social service agencies say they’re doing their best to bring peace to the often-troubled neighborhood of Crown Heights, but despite their efforts, the violence continues.

“I don’t know what the answer is. I guess that’s the million-dollar question,” said city Neighborhood Services Director Margery Pierce, who has been working with the Crown Heights community for about 15 years.

Crown Heights is an ethnically diverse, low-income neighborhood bounded by Mission Avenue to the north, Interstate 5 to the east, Missouri Street to the south and Horne Street to the west.

The community has about 8,000 residents, with a median household income of about $30,000, according to city figures. Many residents live in cramped apartments, often with more than one family sharing the space.

Crown Heights is also home to a criminal street gang, and the large and small crimes that go along with that — from drug deals to murder.

Since March, there have been four shootings, one deadly. And on Jan. 29, a 16-year-old Crown Heights resident named Javier Luna was stabbed to death at the corner of Center Avenue and Division Street in what police said was probably a gang-related crime.

The grief has become familiar to residents and community activists. So has the frustration.

City efforts

On Feb. 4, days after Luna’s slaying, Oceanside Police Chief Frank McCoy issued a memo saying his department “has been expending a significant amount of resources, time and energy to accomplish our goals of establishing and sustaining community trust while reducing/suppressing crime.”

Among other things, the memo said, officers meet regularly with community groups and social service agencies working in Crown Heights to talk about how to improve the area.

McCoy said officers play sports with kids in the neighborhood and work with the Oceanside Unified School District to keep tabs on gang members and affiliates.

He said extra officers have been assigned to patrol the area and a special gang suppression unit enforces a “zero tolerance” policy “to identify, detain, cite and arrest any and all gang members involved in criminal activity.”

Over the last year, the department has conducted four organized sweeps through Crown Heights and stationed a special police van in the community for several weekends after a March murder, McCoy’s memo said

Neighborhood Services Division Manager David Manley said last week that the city has spent $60,000 replacing old streetlights with brighter fixtures, and has stepped up its code enforcement efforts, issuing violation notices covering about a third of the property in Crown Heights. He said the city also organizes regular cleanup drives.

Plans also are in the works to make some physical improvements to the neighborhood, such as moving overhead utility wires underground, Manley said.

On Thursday, the city filed a lawsuit against the manager and owner of a Grant Street apartment complex that officials said has been “a haven for rampant criminal activity and criminal gang activity.”

Problems continue

Yet some in the community say the city has been good at making promises, but not so hot when it comes to delivering the help they need — sometimes something as simple as replacing a burned-out streetlight.

“We cried out for help,” said Ruben Almader, a former Crown Heights resident who still owns property in the neighborhood and plans to move back. “We were promised it was getting better, and it hasn’t.”

About a year ago, after several of the shootings, Almader and other Crown Heights residents met with city officials in a community summit. But Almader said last week that little has come from it.

Some streetlights were added, but not enough, and there has been little response to the community’s request for security cameras to help police monitor gang activity and for more places for activities to give teens alternatives to gangs, Almader said.

“We don’t have the support of the City Council,” said Maria Russell, president of the Eastside Neighborhood Association, which has been working with Crown Heights residents to deal with common problems.

Eastside is another troubled community with a history of gang violence, but the flare-ups there have been less frequent and less public than in Crown Heights.

“They (City Council) don’t even recognize that there are problems in these neighborhoods. I don’t see the support. We need more resources,” Russell said.

She faults the council for cutting back on funding for city libraries and closing one of the city’s two swimming pools.

“I know we need to balance the budget, but sometimes it’s taking from areas like that where you see people suffer, mainly kids,” Russell said.

Officials seek answers

Mayor Jim Wood and several council members say they’re well aware of the problems in Crown Heights and Eastside.

“I’m not sure anything can be done that will solve the problem, because I’m not sure any city in the United States has been able to address the gang problem,” Wood said. “I don’t know how to stop it (gang violence) unless the family members and the rest of the community gets involved to help.”

Councilman Gary Felien said he finds the ongoing violence in Crown Heights frustrating.

“I would certainly support any effort that has a reasonable expense and a reasonable chance,” Felien said. “It’s certainly not my field of expertise. I can’t speak with any authority about what the problems are.”

Like Wood, Councilman Jerry Kern said, “It’s a community problem.”

“It seems to ebb and flow. Something sets somebody off, and it’s either an incident at random or there’s retaliation, and things get scaled up,” Kern said. “We really need the community to be fully involved. If they suspect something’s going wrong, they need to contact police.”

Oceanside Police Capt. Ray Belcher, who oversees the department’s gang detectives and gang suppression team, said some of the violence in Crown Heights actually originates in Eastside as a result of the long-standing rivalry between an Eastside gang and a Crown Heights gang.

“The Eastside is more of the aggressors — they tend to be less of the victims of criminal activity,” Belcher said. “The situations that have been occurring in Crown Heights, they’re not driven by Crown Heights people. They’re usually people coming in and doing the shooting and the stabbings to Crown Heights people.”

‘No silver bullet’

Experts who have studied gangs and worked in neighborhoods elsewhere with problems similar to those of Crown Heights said there are no easy answers.

“There is no kind of magic elixir that cities can take,” said Joe Hicks, vice president of Community Advocates Inc. Hicks was executive director of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission under Mayor Michael Riordan and is an adviser to the U.S. Commission in Civil Rights.

“There is no magic here; there’s no silver bullet,” said Hicks, adding that he knows about Crown Heights. “It’s a puzzle you have to fit together.”

Suppression of gang activity by police is a big part of that, but it has to be done in a way that has the community’s support, Hicks said. That means building trust, doing more than rousting gang members.

In some Los Angeles communities, it took several years, with the police chief spending time in the neighborhoods, going to community meetings, listening and not preaching, Hicks said.

Oceanside police said they’re working to develop that kind of approach in Crown Heights.

“Our job is to try to build different ways and strategies to try to clean up the neighborhood,” Belcher said.

But Belcher said it’s tough to crack the gang culture, with some families having gang connections that go back generations.

“It’s sad, because you get a young gang member, and they grew up in that,” Belcher said.

Gang violence in Crown Heights goes back decades, and efforts to deal with it run almost in cycles.

Carmen Amigon of Community Housing Works said she recalls Crown Heights mothers organizing in the 1990s in an effort to improve the community.

“The community that lives in Crown Heights, the majority are very hard-working, caring individuals who really are trying to improve the quality of life for themselves and their children,” Amigon said.

Amigon said police have done “an incredible job” building trust in Crown Heights, but that doesn’t get at the underlying cause of the neighborhood’s troubles.

“At this point, it will probably be really important to find out what is needed, do an assessment of what services exist, what is already out in the community that can be supported,” Amigon said.

Spurred into action by the latest slaying, leaders of several community groups that work in Crown Heights, including Amigon’s, are meeting to determine what else they can do, said Donald Stump, executive director of North County Lifeline.

“One of the things that we’ve determined is that there’s a lot of resources out there, but we’re not sure they’re very well coordinated and that they’re getting to the people that need them in the community,” Stump said.

Stump said his agency has joined with others serving Crown Heights in applying for an $800,000 federal grant to coordinate their activities “to really focus on community development.”

“We really have to empower and support the residents to say enough is enough,” Stump said. “Some of it you have to do one by one, door by door. Identify people with leadership, people with natural leadership. After that, you start organizing group efforts. It’s a slow process, but I think it’s going to happen.”